Building Bridges

“...it is within our power to build a bridge to be crossed.   Even if my neighbor doesn’t understand my religion or my politics, he can understand my story.  If he can understand my story, then he is never too far from me. I can always build a bridge.”  -- Paul Coelho, introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Alchemist.

I have been reading books from PBS’s Great American Read," and Paul Coelho’s, “The Alchemist” is one of them .   I loved this quote from the introduction because I think it expresses the core of art-making—-connection with others.   It seems to me that all art seeks to communicate and build the kind of bridge Coelho describes--a bridge that can span theological, cultural and ideological differences and create a shared human place in which we can understand each other.  For an artist like me, painting landscapes, that means having another person feel the thrill I felt in the presence of beauty. A fairly small bridge! For someone like Shakespeare, it meant communicating the joy, pain and misunderstanding of young love, or the tragedy of betrayal.    Coelho says he builds bridges so that he will never be alone.    That might be why art is created.  

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